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Florilège

Tokyo

Creative French-Japanese cooking with a vegetable-forward menu and focus on sustainability

On the Pass

Hiroyasu Kawate

Pastry Chef

Okishima Yuya

Ringside seats: At Florilège, chef Hiroyasu Kawate serves his creative tasting menus of contemporary French-accented cuisine to guests seated around a single, long, 16-seater table to encourage conversation and interaction between other diners and the knowledgeable front of house team, who help everyone to understand the ingredients in each dish.

Cooking in his DNA: Kawate comes from a family of chefs: as a child, he never had any doubt that he wanted to follow the same path. After working at Le Jardin des Sens in Montpellier, France, for a year, he returned to Tokyo in 2007 as sous chef at Quintessence under chef Shuzo Kishida. He opened Florilège in 2009, won two Michelin stars in 2018 and five years later, picked up a Michelin Green star and was voted by his peers as the recipient of the Inedit Damm Chefs' Choice Award at Asia's 50 Best Restaurants 2023. In the autumn of the same year, the restaurant relocated to the ultra-modern Azabudai Hills, the tallest building in Tokyo.

Sustainability on the menu: Kawate has a passion for sustainability and the team are committed to serving less meat, dairy and seafood – but certainly with no less of an experience for guests. Modest dish names such as eggplant, mushroom or soybean flan will surprise and impress diners with their complex, deep and unexpected flavours.

Future focus: With more than a decade of creating sustainable tasting menus, Kawate now wants to go further with his mission. Deeply concerned about food waste, he says he feels responsible for improving the situation as a chef, and as a father. The menus at Florilège are now plant forward and centred around locally harvested Japanese vegetables, such as sweet potato.

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